You don’t know until you know (or go into Production)

Over the last six months we have been busy building and implementing an OLS.Switch Issuer Implementation with one of our customers and their banking and payment processing partners. It has been a process of reviewing and implementing message specifications, business processing requirements, authorization rules, clearing, settlement, flat file and reporting requirements. We also filtering external messages into our IMF – Internal Message Format based on ISO8583 v2003, build an interface Card Management functions via our local API’s and message sets. Building client simulators and trying to faithfully reproduce what happens when you are connected to a real system.

Testing on test systems is the next step – replacing our client simulators with other “test” systems that are driven by simulators by the processing gateway we interfaced to. Those simulators have limitations – in their configured test suites or test scripts, some require manual entry to send original data elements for subsequent transaction types, (e.g completions and reversals). We generate clearing and settlement files and match those to on-line test transactions, and our use cases.

After on-line testing, you connect to an “Association” test environment to do “Certification” and run a week’s worth of transactions through a wider test bed. Then you are certified, your BIN goes live and then you enter a production pilot mode – where you watch everything like a hawk.

You can do all of the simulated testing for both on-line transactions and off-line clearing and settlement files that you want – when you connect to the real world and do your first pilot transaction that is where most likely you will see something that wasn’t simulated, tested, or even included in certification, it happens. You need to be proactive, set-up reviews and manual interventions, perform file generation when you have staff available to review the output before it is released for further processing.

What have we seen :

Test environments that are not as robust as production or not setup with up-to-date releases.

Thinly-trafficked transactions: (chargeback, representment)…people can’t even define these much less create them in test

Poor or incorrect documentation of message specifications.

You receive Stand-In Advices or other transactions on-line that you don’t see in testing or certification.

Production pilot is a very important phase of testing – It is where you discover and address the < 1% of issues nobody catches in prior project life-cycles. What can happen, WILL happen. What you think might be something that will occur infrequently will bite you sooner, not later.